What Is Pope Francis Saying to the Right?

Faithful Catholics are deeply confused about what the pope is up to. As our spiritual father, he deserves our deep respect and the benefit of the doubt. When he says things that make us uncomfortable, we ought to be open to the likelihood that he’s saying something true that we’ve overlooked, maybe even presenting a truth we have tried to hide from. (Think of how disquieting some of Christ’s words are in the Gospels.) If even after reflection and prayer we feel sure that he’s wrong—as popes in their personal statements and human decisions have often been wrong in the past—we ought to remember Noah, and not act like scornful sons. We ought to greet papal mistakes with solemn sadness, earnest prayer, and respectful attempts at correction. It is in that spirit that I wish to comment on Pope Francis’s recent interview.

The pope’s most controversial statements seem to arise from a single motive: He doesn’t like “right-wing” Catholics, and wants to make it clear to all the world that he’s not one of them.

Up to a point, I see what he means. From what I have read, in Argentina, a swath of the folks who fought for the Latin Mass also supported the right-wing dictators down there—which means they winked at torture and murder, but their consciences proved too tender to countenance altar girls. I have met this kind of smug zealot up here in the U.S.—the guy you meet at the coffee hour who starts off with pro-life talk, then finds a way to assert that most abortionists are Jewish … and pretty soon he’s pressing on you poorly printed pamphlets that “prove” the Holocaust never happened. I used to argue with people like this, but it led nowhere. (Although I learned how to have some fun with them by “proving” that World War II was also a myth, and that all its “casualties” had really been abducted to serve as slaves in the Zionist tin mines on the Moon.)

I finally had to accept the cold fact that some people are not sincerely mistaken, or even deluded, but rather of evil intent, with wicked hearts and culpable motives. In fact, they’re the kind of “evil company” St. Paul tells us to flee. Likewise, I learned to scorn folks who reject religious liberty, who joke about burning heretics or who condemn the American founding because so many Founders were Freemasons. (They don’t, I notice, denounce the nation of Spain, which was founded by Arian Visigoths.) Some right-wing Catholics embrace a hardline agenda because they feel weak and irrelevant, and prefer magnificent fantasies of wielding power over their neighbors to the slow grunt work of evangelizing.

All this proves absolutely nothing, except that even the most reverently celebrated sacraments aren’t magic. But it does help me cut the pope some slack when he warns against using the traditional liturgy as a tool of ideology. That happens. I’ve seen it, and if you’re on the Internet, so have you. The people who use the Church’s traditions this way are not effective Catholics; some are barely Christian. And there are some loud, but mercifully small, segments of the Church where such people seem to predominate. But they are hardly a threat to anyone but their minor children and long-suffering spouses. There are surely more nuns who practice Wicca in America than there are Inquisition re-enactors—and the former still wield much more power.

I also understand the pope’s main point: you don’t lead people to Christ by starting with the code of Canon Law, or even the canons of natural law. The apostles on Pentecost did not rush into the marketplace to explain the indissolubility of sacramental marriage. They proclaimed the resurrection, and that is the key event which ought to motivate each of us.

That said, the news of the resurrection was not what converted the Roman world. First of all, the eyewitnesses were long-dead by Constantine’s day. And the notion of bodies rising from death was profoundly off-putting to Greeks and Romans who saw the spirit as higher and better than the flesh. What impressed the Romans was how the Christians lived, and their willingness to push back against the corruptions of a dying, death-dealing culture. Christians did not kill their unwanted infants—in fact, they went to the city gates and rescued the infants whom pagans had abandoned. Christians did not divorce, as Romans did; they were more likely to be chaste before marriage and faithful afterward—which led Roman aristocrats to seek out Christian wives. (Think of St. Augustine’s pagan father.) Christians might own slaves, but they did not think it acceptable to use them as sexual concubines or kill them for disobedience. In an increasingly totalitarian Roman state, Christians were even willing to say no to the emperor. These radical acts of resistance to the social and political culture, carried out at personal cost that sometimes included martyrdom, won over jaded residents of the crumbling empire. If anyone today is acting similarly, it is precisely those Catholics who fight the culture of death, who resist the expanding power of a secular government, who refuse the ethic of enlightened hedonism which crusades against cigarette smoking while permitting abortion. They are the pro-lifers, the home-schoolers, the large apostolic families, the members of traditional religious orders who embrace ascetic lives.

The pope is quite right to say we ought to present the beauty of the faith in all its integrity—as he does in his beautiful bookOpen Mind, Faithful Heart, which appears for the first time in English next month. And it is true that the mercy of God is at the heart of this faith. And it was really important to warn Catholics of the need to emphasize mercy … back in the 17th century.

At that time, the most powerful threats to the Faith came from brilliant, apostolic Calvinists and Jansenists, who thundered about the fewness of the saved and almost exulted in the damnation of unbaptized infants. But how many people now are crippled by an excessive fear of God? Is this really the threat we face?

Or do we face increasingly intolerant secular governments that are redefining marriage and punishing Christians who dissent; potent elites who teach our children that “gender” is a social construct subject to surgery; multi-billion-dollar organizations that are trying to spread abortion to every land on earth; totalitarian Islamists who cut the heads off priests and burn down churches; vast countries still ruled by Communist governments which persecute the Church? Do I really need to go on?

There is quite a long list of churches that show no “obsession” with the less-popular parts of the Christian moral message. Instead, for the past 40 years they’ve been preaching mercy, inclusion, tolerance, and a leftist/statist vision of social justice. From the Anglican communion to the United Methodist Church, from the mainline Lutherans to the mainline Presbyterians, every single one of these churches is fading into irrelevance. The Episcopal church (like some shrinking, liberal Catholic religious orders) is right on track to becoming a real estate holding company. Why should we think this universally failed strategy would win not just smiles but souls?

Worst of all, inside the Church, many Catholics are still subject to the power of bitter, dead-ender dissidents, who reject fundamental teachings on faith and morals, and use the institutional power of the Church to impose their views on others. (As feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether once admitted, she stayed inside the Church because it had “the Xerox machines,” and you need Xerox machines to make a revolution.) Such people still control rich religious orders, prestigious universities with billion-dollar endowments, theology departments and seminaries. Is Pope Francis under the impression that liberal Catholics are tolerant? He should talk to faithful priests who endured the vicious regimes of Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles, or Bernadin in Chicago. He will get an earful, and it will be every bit as ugly as the worst horror stories to emerge from the wackiest rad-trad coffee hour.

We are not living in fascist Argentina. The Culture of Death does not answer to men like General Galtieri, but to the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama. The bitterest traditionalists are not serving as tools of a grasping government which seeks to impose an anti-Christian ideology. Angry conservatives are not the cat’s paws of a potent political movement that seeks to marginalize the Church. The mass murder occurring throughout the West is not happening with the connivance of the Catholic right, but of the Catholic left, which pretends a moral equivalence between fundamental issues like abortion and prudential disputes over poverty programs and immigration totals, as a pretext for supporting candidates who oppose the natural law and the sanctity of life.

Holy Father: Absurd as some of us are, we on the Catholic right are not your enemy.

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79 Responses to What Is Pope Francis Saying to the Right?

Other than funnel millions of dollars into anti-Catholic political causes and and organizations that advocate and perform abortions?

Really? You want to draw the line that anyone who funds a political organization which disagrees with Catholic Cant is “anti-Catholic”? And providing funds so that women who desire to have an abortion have a safe place to undergo the procedure is not telling women to have an abortion – you do understand that, do you not?

“I believe that societally we have the ability to avoid a great many abortions by setting up state clinics where any woman wishing an abortion could go and have an induced delivery, with the newborn provided neonatal care by the state until a private party is ready to take over care and raising of the infant.”

Those places are called “public hospitals.” They exist in every major, and most small, cities.

You truly believe that a woman with a 4-month old fetus within her womb can walk into any public hospital and have a state-funded induced delivery? I’m pretty sure that you are wrong here, but I’d welcome the evidence on your part that would prove me wrong.

For my part, and I disagree with many in the pro-choice movement here, were the state to be willing to take the responsibility for the fetus at point a woman was willing to terminate her pregnancy, I would be fine with the state requiring her to go to such a clinic to have her fetus delivered, rather than aborted. The ball is now in your court to facilitate that infrastructure on the part of the state.

I’m a little late to this but to me it seems illogical and incomprehensible to write that the church does not overly focus on abortion, homosexuality, and simultaneously argue that the Pope’s statements have made life much more difficult for conservative Catholic traditionalists. How could Pope Francis no longer “have your back” if the issues he raised aren’t central to your view of what the church should be? But of course they are.

Pretty bad article. First off, don’t draw any conclusions from political parties in Argentina. They got rid of the “right wing” dictators, and replaced them with the left. The first crash resulted in literal starvation, and the second crash is coming soon. There really aren’t any good choices in that country. Then you spend an awful lot of column space discussing a hand full of nuts. How many are there? 50? And yet Traditionalists who aren’t nuts ARE ticked off at this post. Look at the crack down on the FFI. They’re crime? They ordained 450 priests in their brief history, and they said the TLM. 5, yes count them 5, of the priest didn’t like the TLM and whined to roam. Typical example of the hatred of angry neo Catholics. Under Benedict, they got nowhere. Then Francis comes in, crushes them, in places the leader of the liberals as head of their order. There’s no excusing this.

Angry conservatives are not the cat’s paws of a potent political movement that seeks to marginalize the Church.

No, they are the cat’s paws of a potent political party that seeks to exploit the Church for partisan gain, which only incidentally results in the Church’s marginalization.

When the (ostensibly nonpartisan) Knights of Columbus manage to spend a decade of massive political funding in America that does not make the Church look like an active wing of the Republican Party, the days of the Church being a conveniently-exploited and incidentally-marginalized cat’s paw in America will be over.

Interestingly, that seems to be exactly the kind of “less marginalized” result that Francis has in mind. Fancy that.

As usual, most of what was written after “That said” was sort of well, you know, “uncharitable”.
I don’t think the Christians 2000 years ago were out picketing or making silly speeches in the Roman Senate. I think they were trying to avoid being killed (save only those who sought martyrdom).
The whole article, and very many of the comments reminded me of the extreme Protestant view of the Bible, “Paul wrote it, Jesus quoted it, King James stamped it, end of discussion.”
I really do see a lot of “holier than the Pope” Catholics defecting to the SSPX crowd. (What part of “schism” don’t you understand?) And, yet, they proudly claim to be “Conservative”. In A Pig’s Eye!

Derek Leaberry says:
September 27, 2013 at 10:35 am
I can’t help but muse that Pope Francis is telling trads and those who attend the Latin Mass to “go to Hell”. More seriously, he has little use for the Latin Mass. Pope Francis is a Dorothy Day Catholic not a Pope Pius V or X or XII Catholic.

Versus Derek No, No, No. Dorothy Day attended the Latin Mass practically every day. She loved it. Learn some history.

There is no contradiction between belirving that the body and blood of Jesus should be treated with respect at Eucharistic Liturgies–there is no contradiction between that and favoring a Social Democratic state, like France. In fact, the two go together. If Jesus honored the human body by taking it on, how can we dishonor the bodies of those around us by abolishing food stamps or affordable health care.

Francis’s problem is his incoherent inconsistency. He’s for 1950s and 1960s Che Gevara politics, 1970s clown masses and guitar masses, and 14th century sexual morality, teaching that all sex for fellowship is disgusting. Which is why he opposes contraception even for married couples, where sexual pleasure and joy in sexual pleasure can help unifty two persons facing the daily assaults of Republican America.

By the way, I have been attending an Episcopal parish because I am totally bored with talking to anyone that does not celebrate and praise my loving 42-year relationship with another man. I have never seen any statistics. But I have a hunch that the Episcopal church has gained considerable members from the RC, just as it has lost others to the RC. Whether it has gained as many as it has lost, I can’t say, since there is no data.

How does the Latin mass in any way help bring him to the knowledge of the Risen Savior?

Since celebrations of the Latin Mass are generally held in beautiful churches with beautiful music, your hypothetical homeless person might be drawn by the beauty of the music, art, and architecture to learn more about the faith that inspired it. That is the way it has worked for hundreds of years, and is, of course, the purpose of liturgical beauty in the first place.

At David: I deal with homeless/street people all the time, it’s a rare week when I don’t interact with them. Many of them have various problems like schizophrenia, drug/alcohol issues, you name it. Trust me when I tell you all that certainly for many of the people I encounter, beautiful music/art/architecture is going to be totally lost on these people.

I have a question for all of you. For churches around the country/world, define success. The pastor at the one I go used to go to pastoral “conventions” and he would be sitting around with his “colleagues” and they would be talking about the books they had written how big their staffs were, how big their budgets were. He got more and more angry because they weren’t talking about how many lost they had led to Christ.

Saturday night he gives this incredibly powerful sermon the best I’ve heard on salvation, the need for spiritual rebirth, how coming to Christ, repenting, all of it is the only way to heaven, how rituals won’t do it, how sitting in church for 30 years by itself won’t do it. Then in his closing prayer he tells those who haven’t been “born again spiritually” to pray the prayer of salvation. (This is a rather large church by the way.) With every eye still closed he asks those who prayed that prayer to raise their hands and thanked those who did and told them to go to a room outside the auditorium where we will give them a package to help them grow in Christ and courses they can sign up for.

THAT folks is the definition of success for not just this church but any church, how many people you are helping bring to Christ. And every single church needs to take a long look at what they’re doing to further that effort and get rid of anything that gets in the way and if the Latin Mass is not helping get those hands raised, (maybe it is I doubt it) then it needs to be put aside.

And for each of us as Christians we need to get out there and share our faith directly with others. Respectly “MAY I share this with you?” but do it. For the most part they aren’t going to come to us, we’re going to have to go to them and those homeless people aren’t going to know you don’t cheat on your spouse and taxes, that you lead an exemplary life by looking at you for 20 seconds as you walk by, you’re going to have to go up to them and talk to them and others folks. Again the revival starts today and it starts with everyone of us.

“Do I really need to go on?”
How about big-business Christians who “traffic in Christ,” who use Christian values to justify their international expansionism and war-mongering? Or is that the “danger of the Left,” that they might oppose Christians who say they are Christian and then vote for programs to enrich businessmen and to subjugate the poor and the oppressed?

I’d like to take this article seriously, but the hypocrisy is too much; “leftist statism,” i.e. public investment for the poor, are threats to the faith but rightist statism, i.e. public investment for the rich, somehow goes without mention?

Catholic Traditionalists have become the useful idiots of the anti-Catholic liberal establishment. It’s not that they’re wrong in their theology or their stand on the liturgy – quite the reverse – but rather that their disaffection with the Bishops has become self-flagellating and wildly irrational. For instance they’ve made common cause with the anti-Catholic corporate media’s endless vendetta against the Church over clerical child abuse. I long ago lost count of the number of articles I’ve read by Catholic trads that treat all allegations against priests, as opposed to criminal convictions, as proven. Nor will you ever catch any of these scorched earth traditionalists point out the very salient fact that EVERY religion has been plagued by clerical sexual abuse, but that the media deliberately ignore such scandals in other denominations in order to make such abuse seem like a uniquely Catholic problem. The modern traditionalist is characterised by a form of unconscious spiteful, crypto-adolescent rebellion against those in authority in the post Vatican II Church. For these petulant rebels every allegation against the Church must always be true, even when it comes from the Church’s sworn enemies. Even though I’m deeply sympathetic to the cause of Catholic traditionalism, I recently stopped subscribing to one major flagship traditionalist Catholic publication, simply because I was sick of seeing anti-Catholic propaganda recycled under the banner of the Church militant. If I want anti-Catholic propaganda I can buy the Guardian or the NY Times, thank you very much. The problem with Catholic traditionalists these days is that they reserve all their militancy and fighting spirit for those inside the Church.

His statements do not indicate, or imply, or excuse, or justify abortion, or homosexuality, or any other errant human behavior, such as adultery, covetousness, or placing the pursuit of property over the love of God or fellow humans.

And if he had mentioned a few of those other errant human behaviors in his “obsessive” remark, there would probably be less of a kerfuffle. But he didn’t. He stopped at the “conservative” trifecta, hence the kerfuffle. It is obvious that he leans toward the left, which should not be surprising as a Latin American Jesuit. It is also obvious that he does not have as great a focus on what ails North American contemporary Catholics, but then it is not all about North American contemporary Catholicism.

We shouldn’t overemphasize the left-wing leanings of Pope Francis. Consider this: the liberal press didn’t tire of lambasting Benedict XVI for being in the Nazi youth and being a Hitler sympathizer, but I happen to know people who were in the Nazi youth, and it’s pretty clear that if you didn’t register your child into the group, you were in danger of Nazi repression; and while Benedict was indeed conscripted into the German army, he DESERTED it since the Ratzingers were Catholic and hated Hitler for his persecution of Catholics (alongside the Jews and the Communists, Hitler’s biggest enemy was the Catholic Church). Meanwhile, the liberal press fawns of Francis, who happens to have his own relation to a fascist regime: Argentina’s military dictatorship, led by Peron, and he has been accused, by former members of his church in Argentina, of collaborating with the dictatorship, or at least looking the other way when members of his congregation were imprisoned and tortured by the regime. So again, don’t overemphasize Francis’ left-wing Catholicism: he may be liberal on social issues, but he’s not more than a liberal, always ready to compromise with fascism….

Quote from the article:
“He should talk to faithful priests who endured the vicious regimes of Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles, or Bernadin in Chicago. He will get an earful, and it will be every bit as ugly as the worst horror stories to emerge from the wackiest rad-trad coffee hour.”
Unfortunately, Francis lauds Mario Cardinal Martini in his interview, and Martini is very much in the mold of both of the prelates mentioned. So we must ask ourselves the question: is Francis on the side of the faithful, orthodox priests who tried to resist evil men in high places, or would he side the prelates named? Scary times.

For the first time in 50 years there is a Pope who is not in the pocket of right wing Catholics and the alarm bells are sounding. Have you prayerfully, carefully considered what he actually said about the emphasis upon abortion and homosexuality at the expense of equally important Catholic ideals?

Your knee jerk (and rather childish…”liberals are bad too”)
defensiveness suggests you haven’t. As a liberal, I can assure you Francis is not one. As a Jesuit though he does not fit the cookie-cutter Cardinal of the John Paul II – Benedict XVI mold. He is more intellectual, less rigid and yes, more open-minded.

Flexibility, intellect and open-mindedness are not proof of liberal leanings. It is quite amusing that they set off such panic among you. Relax. He is conservative–just not obsessed and rigid like so many in the church hierarchy.

A rather hysterical Zimrak, writes”He should talk to faithful priests who endured the vicious regimes of Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles, or Bernadin in Chicago.”. Actually, Zim, Francis undoubtedly knew both Cardinals better than you ever will and is probably able to evaluate them without your “help.”. But thanks for the knee-jerk assessment. Ever so helpful.

As I think about the Gospels, I have to note that there’s very little about sex in them. The point the Pope is making is that sexual issues are as a candle in the Sun to the basic teachings of Jesus who we claim to hold as a divinity. Conservative Christians with their obsession with what I consider peripheral issues have managed to shut the ears of the very people who, on the inside, crave the message of the Christian Church (I’m not Catholic). That message is what is missing from contemporary society. In fact, if you look at the Bible I don’t believe there’s anything about abortion and homosexuality is not a major issue it is proscribed, to be sure, among a group of laws that no one follows anyway. As for St. Paul, he grouped, rightly, fornicators together with homosexuals as people who use sex as a recreation and did not, as I recall, single out gays, lesbians and cross-gendered.

If your going to emulate the early church then you might want to understand it’s failings. All those children they recused turned out be useless when it came to defending the cities and growing food(The warnings the bible gives about bastardy was ignored). The church invited in a lot barbarians groups against the will of the Romans on the idea they would beat their swords into plow shears. Of course they continued being barbains and destroyed Romes ability to defend the border. Christan pacifism made it very difficult to run punitive raids on enemies.

After the fall of Rome the church rebuilt itself with Christ as a god of battle to appeal to the pagans and crafted it’s doctrine on the basis of the best of human knowledge. Christan became manly and powerful people by embracing Christ’s warlike nature in addition to his grace and mercy.

Infanticide was dealt with by ignoring it or by sending the bastards off to monetarists or nunneries where they wouldn’t produce more bastards. The church helped the poor, but more importantly they helped the poor help themselves by finding productive things for them to do. The church found a place for everyone in society without allow those people to cause harm. They crafted doctrine on the basis of what would be good 400 years from now and built the greatest civilization in history.

…i will wait and see what Francis really means. He really isnt saying anything different then any other pope.

as long as the catholic church still keeps preaching against abortion, gay marriage and contraception, as well as forgiving sinners and helping the poor & sick, then all is good. that has always been the way and i dont see that changing anytime soon. The church has always taught and practiced to hate sin but love the sinner as well as love those who are less fortunate.

sure certain members were weak in practicing catholicism, not all of us are saints….but that makes them/us “liberal” not “conservative.”

the evil in the church was & is caused by liberal catholics and that will never change. you cannot feed the poor but abort the children of the poor. That is liberalism.

there is no “right wing” of the catholic church. it doesnt exist and never has. as far as “traditional wing”, if there is one it has absolutely no power and it also preaches against abortion, gay marriage and contraception, as well as forgiving sinners and helping the poor & sick. so its not “traditional” but simply “catholic.”

to preach and practice the timeless truths of catholicism doesnt make you a conservative catholic…it makes you catholic. St. Pat, St Francis, St Anthony, St Hildegard were all practicing catholics and believed the same things a practicing catholic believes today.

most liberal catholics are not practicing catholics or they have left the church or dont attend often except for 2 times a year, christmas and easter. Even if they are in the church as laity in administrative positions, they dont follow, promote or believe in the timeless truths of the catholic faith.

if anything, liberal catholics judge the rest of the church and the pope more than they are judged.

Mr.Zmirak: No matter how much you think you know the Catholic Church, you don’t. Christ is the Church. We must serve Him, not people! Our Lord said, “By their fruits you shall know them”. Before Vatican ll, the Catholic Church was thriving. After Vatican ll, so many left the Church, seminaries closed, Churches were sold, nuns took off their habits etc. In other words a liberal Church has been a disaster! I need to say no more.